Tagging composer package updates

Question

I have a PHP composer package that requires "illuminate/support":"4.1.*" for use with Laravel 4.1 integration. I have a new Laravel project that is now at v 4.2.*. I believe I now need to update the package to require "illuminate/support":"4.2.*" (due to composer errors). How best do I maintain support for Laravel v4.1 and v4.2 in the package?

Here is my composer package's composer.jsonfile:

{
    "name": "appointedd/appointedd-php",
    "description": "",
    "authors": [
        {
            "name": "Billy Jones",
            "email": "billy@appointedd.com"
        }
    ],
    "require": {
        "php": ">=5.3.0",
        "illuminate/support": "4.1.*",
        "guzzlehttp/guzzle": "~4.0"
    },
    "autoload": {
        "psr-0": {
            "Appointedd\\Appointedd": "src/"
        }
    },
    "minimum-stability": "stable"
}

It's currently tagged at version 0.0.3. Should I update the composer.json file to require 4.2.* and tag it 0.1.0 or use a more meaningful name?

Answer 1

The question is what differences are between 4.1 and 4.2 that you need to support it differently. Semantic versioning should guarantee that newer minor version only introduces BC-compatible features and bug fixes.

As for your question, you can include version range in your composer.json file, as described here:

Range >=1.0 >=1.0,<2.0 >=1.0,<1.1 | >=1.2 By using comparison operators you can specify ranges of valid versions. Valid operators are >, >=, <, <=, !=. You can define multiple ranges, separated by a comma, which will be treated as a logical AND. A pipe symbol | will be treated as a logical OR. AND has higher precedence than OR.

In your situation, it would be something like:

"illuminate/support": ">=4.1.0,<4.3",